Conwy County Borough Council's Social Media Engagement Soars with the WiFi SPARK Platform

October 20th 2015: Following a successful proof of concept of the SPARK® Guest WiFi solution, Conwy County Council has now finished its rollout of guest WiFi to fifty of its sites. Venues include offices, libraries, leisure centres, Conwy Business Centre and Council Chamber.

The Solution
Visitors simply connect to the WiFi network and are then taken to Conwy’s branded User Experience Portal. From here, they can choose to log in via their social media account or fill in a simple registration form.

Virtualised SPARK® software was installed in Conwy’s data centre, alleviating the need for any additional hardware to be installed. The new service is provided over Conwy’s existing Cisco wireless infrastructure leveraging further return on investment.

WiFi SPARK has tailored the solution to be fully Conwy branded and offer guests free access to the internet through a registration form or signing in with Facebook.
The take-up has been phenomenal. Facebook registrations via the WiFi have reached almost ten thousand, resulting in a huge increase in social media engagement for the Council.

Conwy receives monthly usage figures and can analyse the data through the SPARK® Analytics Dashboard for a greater insight about the devices connecting to the service.

Adrian Hughes Principal Network Architect from Conwy County Borough Council stated: “The WiFi SPARK solution has definitely been a success – and not only by the take up of users of the service! The method used in extending the service across the Council’s network means little additional work or complications for our own support staff.”

User Engagement
WiFi SPARK’s design team worked with Conwy County Borough Council to create a User Experience Portal (UEP) that would not only be branded to Conwy’s exact requirements, but also provide the relevant data collection information for both marketing and compliance. The UEP also has a multi-language feature allowing visitors to choose to view the Portal in Welsh or English.

Conwy needed to provide guests with the choice to opt in to news from the Council as well as increase their social media profile. SPARK® supports endless authentication options as well as the ability to tailor the data collection fields to each business’ requirements.

Safe Browsing
With Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) compliant filtering as standard and being a proud member of the Friendly WiFi scheme introduced by the Government in July last year, WiFi SPARK gives the end user the assurance that they are protected when they log in to a SPARK® system; especially important where children may be using the Internet.